


cultivate your garden

by xenoglossy



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-28 19:38:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17793503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenoglossy/pseuds/xenoglossy
Summary: Anthy can't bring herself to give up gardening, but she can try growing something different.





	cultivate your garden

At first, Anthy had sworn off gardening. After all, if she left Ohtori only to spend her days in the same way somewhere else, could she truly say she was free of it? And in any case, perhaps it was best not to do anything that would bring back unpleasant memories. Best to start afresh, as much as that was possible.

Eventually, though, she found that she missed it--the smell of the earth and the feel of it under her hands; the experience of nurturing a small, fragile living thing and watching it flourish; the feeling of creating something real and tangible, proof of her existence in the world. So, perhaps inevitably, she went back to it. This time she wouldn't grow roses, though. She was done with cultivating the kind of garden whose only value was in its beauty, the kind that was supposed to be frozen in time, every plant watched carefully for any attempt to grow past its bounds and trimmed back if it tried to do so. The useless kind of garden that was of no help to anyone. This time, she decided, she would grow vegetables.

Anthy had many lifetimes of experience with gardening, but she had never grown vegetables before--had never grown that many different types of plants in a single garden, for that matter. An outdoor garden, too, was not the same as a greenhouse. So there were many things to learn: how much shade or sun each plant wanted, and how much water; how to deal with pests without rendering the vegetables inedible; when to plant and when to harvest. It kept her occupied.

And the strange thing was, while the rose garden had kept her in one place, the vegetable garden seemed to keep sending her outward. She went to the library to get books on gardening. Some of the librarians started to recognize her, and asked her how her plants were coming along whenever they saw her. Even a small number of plants produced more vegetables than a single person could possibly eat, so, not wanting to waste them, she gave them out to neighbors and people that she knew. She went back to the library for cookbooks, and while her early efforts were best disposed of in private, eventually she began to create food that was actually edible. And if she had too much of that, too, what could she do but share it as well?

It would be nice to say that in this way, she made good friends and became an indispensable part of a community, but her many years of isolation were not so easily overcome. To those around her, she suspected she was a strange and mostly reclusive woman who would periodically appear, as if out of nowhere, to hand you a bag of tomatoes or radishes, or a head of cabbage. That she could be seen from time to time sitting in the grass in front of her house feeding her vegetables to wild rabbits probably didn't help with this perception. (She had fences up, of course, to prevent them from eating whatever they liked, but they were so persistent in their pursuit of this goal that she took pity on them sometimes.)

But it was a start. It was a connection, however tenuous, to the wider world. Someday, Anthy hoped, when she found Utena again, Anthy could make her a home-cooked meal--perhaps a nice, not-too-spicy vegetable curry. And when the meal was over, Anthy could take Utena out into the garden, and show her how much she'd grown.


End file.
